In recent years and in a manufacturing site such as a factory, a robot system equipped with a robot arm often does work instead of a human. The work that the robot system can do has been complicated and sophisticated. For example, the robot system equipped with an imaging camera acquires a captured image of an object to be worked such as a manufactured component and analyzes the captured image, thereby allowing the robot arm to be moved to a position suitable for the work.
In the above robot system, if the field of view of the imaging camera is obstructed by an obstacle such as a work table, a necessary image cannot be captured to preclude the robot system from doing a proper work. Therefore, in the robot system doing a complicated work, it is required to arrange structural members such as the robot arm, the imaging camera, and the object to be worked in an appropriate position.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2008-21092 discusses a robot system equipped with an imaging camera which acquires a virtual space image (computer graphics image) imitating an image captured by the imaging camera. The virtual space image is visually confirmed by an operator and the operator arranges the imaging camera in a proper position.
In the technique discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2008-21092, however, the operator visually confirms the virtual space image, so that degree of freedom of arrangement of the structural member is high to increase a burden to the operator when a complicated and manifold work is done. For example, if it is assumed that a lighting system has 20 patterns of lighting directions and 10 candidates for a lighting position, and an imaging camera has 20 patterns of imaging directions and 10 candidates for an imaging position. In this case, the operator has to confirm 20 *20*10*10=40000 combinations of the virtual space images to find the arrangement most suitable for the work, which makes it very difficult for the operator to visually confirm the images. The more complicated the robot system, the greater the number of the virtual space images to be confirmed and the burden to the operator.